


They Shall Not Grow Old

by racketghost



Series: Strange Moons [10]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Aziraphale has a bit of a monster kink, Crowley is a corvid. He collects things, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Masturbation, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-27
Updated: 2019-11-27
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:33:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,925
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21576865
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/racketghost/pseuds/racketghost
Summary: He cannot exactly say,I have not seen you for fifty-three days and I committed the sin of onanism thinking about what you look like underneath your human skin.He cannot exactly say,I do not like not knowing where you are and books are no longer giving me the kind of thrill that dampens the void of your absence.Nor can he readily admit,I want to kiss you on the mouth and witness how your eyes look at me across the bed in the dark.
Relationships: Aziraphale & Crowley (Good Omens)
Series: Strange Moons [10]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1480787
Comments: 130
Kudos: 633
Collections: The Strange Mooniverse





	They Shall Not Grow Old

**Author's Note:**

> Title comes from For The Fallen, a poem by Laurence Binyon about WW1.
> 
> So, this is it. Thanks for coming on this journey with me and indulging me. I'll continue this with a chaptered story (or, oh god, another series) that leads up to the modern day, but for now their time in World War 1 is over. 
> 
> Also a little content warning: this part contains some brief, non-graphic depictions of self-harm (both by substance abuse of the alcoholic kind and also physical scratches/cutting). 
> 
> Finally, if you want a truly spectacular album to listen to that suits this series, please listen to You Want It Darker by Leonard Cohen. It's really quite perfect. [RoS13](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RoS13/pseuds/RoS13) pointed this out to me and it's brilliant.

And love is a ghost that the others can't see  
It's a danger  
Every shade of us you fade down  
to keep them in the dark on who we are  
(oh what you do to me)  
Gonna be the death of me  
It's a danger  
'Cause our love is a ghost that the others can't see

- _Familiar_ , Agnes Obel

London

November, 1918 

There are still mud stains on his carpet.

He is on his hands and knees, working at the mark. The tin bucket next to him makes musical clinking sounds as he dips the boar-hair brush in, brings it out, knocks the excess water from its bristles.

He has never been one for cleaning but he has seen the way Crowley’s eyes catch on the motes of dust that hang in the sunlight when he comes over, has seen how his gaze lingers on the carpet stain, the water rings on the table tops.

A miracle would fix this, would probably make all of this much easier. But he would always know the stain was there, beneath it all— because miracles seem like illusions, like magic tricks. Miracles make things _look_ better but not _feel_ better— like how he can still feel the blood stain on his medic uniform lying pressed and spotlessly clean on the bed upstairs.

Aziraphale stops, inhales, closes his eyes— tries not to think about beds or what people get up to in them, tries not to think about what it would feel like to have Crowley in one, a _proper_ one— not some military-issued cot in the desert or some spring-loaded _thing_ in the hills of Austria-Hungary. But a real bed. _Crowley’s_ bed.

Just those two words together: Crowley’s bed-- does something magnetic to the iron pumping through his veins, redirects it, makes it conductive. A chemical reaction that makes his breath hitch in his throat, makes the room feel suddenly too small.

It has been exactly fifty-three days since the battle of Meggido, in Israel. Exactly fifty-three days since he has seen Crowley, had those visions, felt passages from a book of end times rise like bile in the back of his throat.

Exactly fifty-three days since… since…

 _I endeavor to make you say that word—_ he remembers the sound of Crowley sucking kisses into his skin— _as often as possible_.

He opens his eyes again and scrubs a little harder at the carpet. 

He is alone in his shop but he feels it, _feels it_ — the weight of his desire is like another person beside him, taking up space. He can feel it in the bookshelves and in the corners of the room, on the ceiling, just over his shoulder: desire yes, and also some soft-footed animal in the shadows— _fear_.

He folds back his sleeves, tucks them neatly beneath the cuff-buttons of his shirt, gets back to work. The scrub brush makes rhythmic hushing sounds on the carpet, matching the cadence of his breath.

He stops, wipes his brow, keeps going.

Fear of the future, of Armageddon. Fear of being found-out. Fear of what will happen—always— both tomorrow and today.

Fifty-three days and he can still feel the burnt heat of the sun on his neck, the grit of stone and coarse sand under his fingernails, Crowley’s mouth between his legs.

He parts his lips and breathes down at the carpet, at the oil-dark stain his muddy jacket and muddy shoes had left here over a year ago.

_I’ll carry it for you. Let me carry it._

Crowley’s voice echoes up from somewhere inside of him, from somewhere inside this bookshop, maybe from inside the stain itself— a residual haunting of that night here from Passchendaele, memories etched into the floor.

He closes his eyes, squeezes them up tight, presses the heel of his palm against the growing hardness between his legs.

There was a time before humans had invented machine guns, before they had invented cars or even saddles. A time when life was slow, languid. It took its time in everything— the evolving cycle of agriculture was slow and new technology was slow and the stretch of years between meetings with Crowley was also, predictably, _slow_. And that slowness was okay, dependable even, preferable.

Now fifty-three days feels like a century.

He dips the brush into the bucket, taps the extra water free, scrubs the stain. There is the back and forth rhythm of his left hand there on the scrub brush, him on his hands and knees.

There is a burn that swims through his bloodstream and occupies the vacant rooms in his chest. The rooms that house curiosities that he does not allow himself to speak aloud. Rooms that wonder what Crowley looks like in the morning (red hair out of place but brilliant in dawn-light, grouchy, yes, but also soft, smelling like sleep), what he dreams about ( _do you dream of laying me down on white sheets too?_ ), what his kisses feel like on his neck his chest his back— on his lips too ( _will they part for me? Will you let me in?_ )

 _Maybe someday,_ he thinks, because a kiss on the mouth seems more intimate somehow, a sublingual label that will etch itself into their skin until everyone can see it. Sex is fine. Sex is _animal_. Kisses are _human_.

And he can’t have that— not yet— not with Armageddon somewhere on the horizon line and angels over their shoulders and demons ready pull Crowley back to hell.

 _Not yet_ , he thinks.

He tries to quell the rising thought of, _then when?_ that keeps bubbling up in the back of his throat.

He works his hand back and forth, back and forth, tries to get lost in the rhythm of it.

_‘I already told you you stupid angel— anytime’_

Back and forth, back and forth.

 _‘I hope you know_ —‘

Back and forth—

‘ _That I endeavor to make you say that word—‘_

Back and—

 _‘—as often as possible_.’

Aziraphale sits up suddenly, throws the brush in the bucket. He stares down at the stain and the bucket and the brush with a kind of resolute frustration, a touch of anger. Anger because his brain is seemingly incapable of doing anything other than think of Crowley, remember their last meeting, sweat endlessly over the way it all went down. Incapable of doing anything other than _want_ , desperately— as if _want_ is an emotion like grief, incapable of being escaped. 

He stands up, brushes his hands down his trousers and spares a glance at the shop door.

It is still locked from this morning— it has been locked more often than not the last four years.

He licks his lips and looks toward the stairwell in the backroom, the one that leads directly to the bedroom. There is a flush blooming across his cheeks and he smoothes over it with frustrated hands, rubbing across his eyes.

“I’m _alone_ , for goodness’ sake,” he mutters, and takes himself up stairs.

* * *

He has done this before, he’s sure of it. _When_ he last did it is another matter entirely.

As such he supposes that he ought to make something of an occasion out of it— his bow tie, for instance, will remain on. As will his waistcoat and most of his trousers. His shoes can come off, however, but the socks— the socks stay on.

He exhales into the hazy golden room, steeling himself against the headboard.

 _Now how would you do it?_ He thinks, and finds himself flushing again.

It is not as though he has never imagined what Crowley would do to him, here, on a proper bed. But those are thoughts that float up when he can’t concentrate on his reading, on his medic duties, on his scrubbing of the floor. But it is a different matter entirely to be sitting on a bed, deliberately trying to think of what Crowley would do to him if he were here.

He feels a bit silly, and is beginning to have second thoughts about the whole thing— ready to just pull his trousers back up and have another go at the stain downstairs.

But then he turns his head to the right— to the tiny bathroom.

There is the fine amber light of mid-morning filtering through his windows and painting that familiar liminal space in a sort of dreamy halcyon glow, until the tiles themselves appear to be emitting light, his bottles of soap like tiny prismatic lanterns along the wall.

Aziraphale realizes that Crowley has never seen it in this light— what with the demon always coming at night, staying too late, bathing with the lights off.

There is the lip of his bathtub peeking out through the doorway and the lambent stretch of honeycomb tile where Crowley had laid that night— his hair like a spill of blood against the white— and Aziraphale blinks, knowing what it looks like to see actual blood on white floors, on white fabric, on white towels— on Crowley’s white stretch of hip.

He stares down into that space on his right like he can see their ghosts— like he can see the memories of their bodies imprinted in the empty air, can see Crowley spread out and leaking, sucking his lip between his teeth.

 _His teeth_ — he had _fangs_ — of a sort, impossibly white and a bit uneven, the incisors sharp and tilted in like a predator’s.

 _Oh_ , he thinks at the pulse of blood between his legs, the sudden flush of heat up his chest, the _want_ reimagined, _there you are_.

He reaches a hand inside his pants, glances around, pulls himself out. He gives a tentative squeeze, biting out a moan.

It isn’t at all like when Crowley does it— it feels altogether a bit wrong and a bit underwhelming— but then he turns his head and stares down onto the tile floor that Crowley had leaked all over— and he hadn’t cleaned it, he _never_ cleaned it, and probably wouldn’t, ever, now that he thinks about it, now that he realizes he has little bits of Crowley there on the tile.

He moves his hand a bit faster, trying to mimic that way he had done it in the desert, the slow pull down, the swift twist up.

He gasps into the empty room, his heartbeat some loud, insistent animal in his chest, demanding tribute.

‘ _Angel, angel_ ’— he can remember the sound of Crowley rutting up against his back, shivering in that little slice of hillside a year ago, the desperate, stilted cadence of his voice.

And then the sight of Crowley’s eyes looking up at him from the floor of that bathroom— the way they had an iridescence to them in the dark, like a cat’s eye, like moonstone.

And he isn’t sure why it happens— why his body tightens like a bow-string at the mere thought of his demon and the mysteries locked up under his skin. The _peculiar set of extras_ , he had called it. The sharp teeth, the vertical-slitted eyes, the way his spine and his limbs seemed to obey something far different than any sort of gravity that Aziraphale had ever known, the fact that the skin that he wore as a human was just that— a skin— something he could take off and hang up and underneath would be something else: a snake perhaps, or something more upsetting, more horrible.

 _But I like what’s underneath,_ he thinks. _I like all of your shapes, your darkness, your indecisions,_ and lifts his hand up to his mouth, sucks on the index finger, _let me see them all_.

And then before he can think about it too much wedges that hand down into his pants, presses the wet finger against his entrance there.

His hips lift of their own accord, head falling back against the wall behind him, eyes screwing up tight.

Crowley had licked him, _licked him_ — between his legs, _inside_ of him— not even caring that Aziraphale had been walking around the desert all day, riding that horse, sweating and probably stinking of fear and blood and bullet casings.

He had never felt so wanted in his entire existence— like he was good enough— _as is_ — a non-conditional sale. Good enough to eat reeking of anxiety and indecision, with warped floorboards and stains on the carpet. Good enough to eat even after bad dreams, after bleeding all over Crowley’s hands, water damage in the basement.

He pushes that finger inside, just a bit, his body clamping down on it in reflex.

He thinks of Crowley on a bed, underneath of him, that flat chest hard and smooth under his hands— thinks of sinking down onto the entire hard length of him, all of him— bottom-to-hip, fully seated— of what Crowley’s face would look like— would he come quickly? Would he hold himself off forever, until Aziraphale tells him _it’s okay, darling, you can let go?_ Would he want Aziraphale to hold him down again? Imprint the bed with the outline of his bones?

Aziraphale rolls his hips against the finger inside of him— the hand around him, regretting the confines of his trousers hindering his movement.

 _Will you do this to me?_ He thinks wildly, his hand squeezing a little tighter, fucking himself down onto his finger— just one— and he wonders how he would manage to fit Crowley-- all of him, in his body and his life. _I’ll find a way_ , he thinks, _I’ll open up for you. You can open me up too— crawl all the way inside— with your fingers, your tongue—_

And just the thought of that long tongue is enough— the way he can see it forking a bit when Crowley gets really heated, the way it struggles to wrap around words in his mouth, the way it makes him hiss when he’s tired and he forgets himself— the way that mouth looks like it holds Aziraphale’s name in it— all the time, _always_ — is enough to send him shuddering into his palm in hot contractions, muscles squeezing up tight.

He unglues his eyelids and stares, drained-- trying furiously to suck more air into his lungs-- at the bathroom floor again. Imagines the mountains of those white hipbones underneath his hands, the flat valley between them.

He tucks himself back into his trousers, walks into that bathroom, his heart still pounding. He washes his hands in the sink and stares at the little three-legged stool beneath the exposed plumbing, can remember sitting on it and weaving his hands through Crowley’s hair in the dark.

He looks up into his own blue eyes— plain, unremarkable— thinking of ones that shine like moonstone in the dark.

He swallows, straightens his bow-tie, and from the window behind him that leads out to the city streets he can hear something peculiar— the golden chiming of church bells.

* * *

There are humans flooding the streets.

He has never seen such a mass of bodies— all of them having dropped whatever it was that they were doing last— farriers still in their leather aprons, mechanics with black grease like gloves up their arms, seamstresses with loose threads hanging off their skirts, without hats, charging the streets.

Aziraphale steps out onto the granite slab of the shop threshold, breathes in the sudden and inexorable energy of a thousand collective hearts all beating in relief— it is over. At last, _at last,_ it is over.

At some point he will grab a newspaper, speak to a police officer. He will learn that on that unexceptional Monday morning when he had decided to scrub at a stain on his carpeted floor, that an armistice with Germany had been signed. He will learn that it was signed in a railroad carriage in France at 5 A.M. at Compiègne. He will learn that soldiers continued to fire at each other until sometime around 11 A.M., when news finally reached the front that a cease-fire had been ordered. He will learn that the soldiers almost immediately greeted each other in No-Man’s Land, exchanged souvenirs and tokens of good will, the Germans bowing solemnly in defeat and heading home.

And when he finally sits down some many hours later, alone in his bookshop, mulling over the incredible design of the entire theater of war— how it all ended on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month— four years, three months, and two weeks of fighting— he will feel all at once a great reaffirming faith settle in his bones that he has not felt since before the war. A cementing of belief that all of this, this entire time, has been a part of Her plan. Of course it has been. The _ineffable_ one.

He will sit like that, in the warm glow of his electrical lighting and his candles that never burn out for many long hours— until the shadows creep up the walls and the raucous energy of hopeful humans dims to a quiet murmur— and underneath the relief, the radiant and profound gratitude that it is all over, _finally_ — he will wonder where his dearest friend is, and why he has not heard from him in fifty-three days.

* * *

Crowley would come to him. _Of course_ Crowley would come to him. Crowley _always_ came to him.

He smooths his hands down his thighs, tries not to fret too much.

But worry is beginning to settle in his bones until he feels leaden with it, weighed impossibly down.

 _We should really have a rendezvous point_ , he thinks, chewing on his bottom lip.

He has been holed up in his bookshop for a few days— waiting for the inevitable slam of Crowley coming through it like some sort of natural disaster— a hurricane of personality. But the door remained closed and the bell above it never rang and he eventually gave up on trying to get the color of mud and tank-engine grease from his carpet.

So now he is here, in Saint James’ Park, looking around for a familiar face, dark glasses, red hair.

There is a bandstand down the pathway from him, and beyond it the once beautiful stretch of lake that is now drained and filled instead with the bleak and anachronistic shapes of wartime government buildings.

He feels a brief wash of relief at the idea that all of that— the transitory housing and the tanks and the need to use all resources, no matter how precious, for the war-effort is now, _finally_ , over.

_Now where are you?_

Perhaps he should have gotten that telephone when Crowley had brought it up. The idea of it seemed improper— that anyone could just _ring_ him at anytime, day or night, without asking, and expect him to pick up. It all seemed very invasive and he had enough difficulty chasing away humans trying to buy his books without also fending them off over the telephone.

But now he is regretting it.

_I could be calling you right now._

It occurs to him that perhaps Crowley _did_ get a telephone. Perhaps he has one in his flat right now. There is a strange thread of something— jealousy?— that winds up through him at the idea of someone _else_ calling Crowley’s phone, someone else hearing his voice over wires.

He sucks his teeth.

_I’m being ridiculous. Of course he doesn’t have a telephone._

He stands, straightens his coat.

 _I’m not terribly far,_ he thinks, heading toward the exit.

He is fairly certain he knows where Crowley lives, even if he has never been there physically. He had once received a box of chocolates in the mail with Crowley’s Mayfair address on it and he had saved it— the carefully torn corner— in the till of the bookshop.

He tries not to think about what he will say when he gets there— what his excuse will be for showing up like this, unannounced, at his flat where he has never been. He cannot exactly say, _I have not seen you for fifty-three days and I committed the sin of onanism thinking about what you look like underneath your human skin._ He cannot exactly say, _I do not like not knowing where you are and books are no longer giving me the kind of thrill that dampens the void of your absence._ Nor can he readily admit, _I want to kiss you on the mouth and witness how your eyes look at me across the bed in the dark._

Aziraphale straightens his bow-tie and figures that he will know what to say when he gets there and not a moment sooner— because there is a plan to everything, even this, and everything that is meant to happen _will happen_ — of course it will— all in due time.

* * *

There is something unearthly about his door.

Aziraphale raises a hand, hesitates, not knowing if it is okay to touch it— and then knocks.

It is a large, wooden thing, dark and ornately carved. The hardware is impossibly, ridiculously huge. Extravagant beyond measure.

He knocks again.

There is nothing from the inside— less than nothing even— as if beyond the door is the vacuum of space.

Aziraphale clears his throat.

“Crowley?”

He glances behind him, suddenly aware that any number of Hell’s creatures could be watching him.

A sudden thrill of fear races up his back— were there demons _inside?_ Is that why he had never been invited here?

And then another, distinctly less self-aggrandizing fear surfaces: do demons have Crowley? Is that why he has not seen him, heard from him?

He grabs at the handle and pushes— but it’s locked. He spares another glance around, checking for humans watching him this time— and squares his shoulder against the door.

With a quick and easy shovel of his shoulder into door the lock inside breaks off. The door swings opens.

He steps inside, uncertain, looking down the dark, cavernous hallway.

There is a lump in his throat at the darkness, at the absurdly tall ceilings and the inexplicable presence of stone, everywhere, on everything. Stone floors and stone tables, and there at the end of the long hallway— a stone fireplace.

He closes the door behind him quietly, stepping into the black.

“Crowley?” He is whispering his name, strangely frightened.

Because for all Crowley was _his_ demon, _his_ friend— the often silly sarcastic tender-heart that brooded so much and liked himself so little— he was also _from Hell_.

And Aziraphale is afraid of Hell, even if he knows the outcome of the war— the outcome that says that Heaven will win, of course it will, because Good always triumphs over Evil. He is afraid because Hell is the place that turns angels into demons, the place that boiled Crowley alive and split his tongue in two.

“Crowley?” He asks again, louder, stepping into that room with the stone fireplace that has embers still glowing amongst the ash.

It is… _black_ in this room. The curtains are pulled and there is the distinct smell of cigarette smoke and the sharp tang of alcohol, of _sweat_ , the familiar burnt ozone smell of a match being struck.

He turns where he stands, blinking into the darkness, scanning the room for something, some presence being here, demonic or not.

There is some sort of shining metallic sculpture along the wall, on a stone pedestal, but it is too dark to make out. And there in the corner, up by the ceiling, curled into a ball— is… _something_.

Aziraphale steps closer, blinking, willing his eyes to adjust to the blackness, wishing he could see in the dark like Crowley can.

He squints up at that strange dark mass.

Not something, some _one_.

Crowley is on the ceiling, on the wall, bent in two between them like he is a buttress supporting them. It is… _terrifying_ for some reason. He is in all black— everywhere— and Aziraphale realizes he has not seen him wear clothes like this in a long time, perhaps not for years, not since the start of the war that kept him in the military fatigues of various countries. Greens and blues, grays.

“Crowley,” he says, definitive, louder.

The dark shape moves until there is the unfurling of a long neck, swiveling around to look over his dark shoulder. There are eyes there, in the darkness, blinking like a cat’s eye, iridescent, a bit of moonstone.

“Aziraphale?”

Aziraphale smiles at the sound of his name in Crowley’s mouth, the sleepy half-formed emphasis on the ending, - _phale_ , sounding like _ale_ instead of _fell_.

He’d been sleeping.

“Hello, dear. I was… I was quite worried,” Aziraphale clasps his hands together behind his back, blinking up at the dark shape on the wall, “so I came to see how you were.”

Those eyes are blinking wetly down at him, and then all at once, as if Crowley just realized that this _isn’t_ a dream— turns completely around, there on the junction of ceiling and wall, as if he is standing on solid ground.

Something turns in Aziraphale’s stomach at it— it is so unnatural, so impossibly, terribly demonic— ancient and unholy and powerful. But there is something else there too, beneath the ingrained revulsion— _heat_. _Want_.

He is suddenly grateful for the dark room and the distance between them— although he is certain that Crowley’s snake tongue can taste the blood blooming beneath the skin on his face anyway.

“Oh, _fuck_.”

Crowley falls to the floor in a sudden act of gravity, landing in a protracted pile of limbs on the stone floor.

Aziraphale sucks in a surprised breath, “oh dear, are you all right?”

“Fuck, fuck, _fuck_ ,” Crowley snaps his fingers and the curtains part, throwing the room into sudden white light. He finds his legs underneath of him, stands shakily against the wall.

He is wearing trousers that are more hole than denim, black and loose around his hips. There is the brief flash of white-pale skin through one of the holes and Aziraphale’s mouth goes suddenly dry.

“Oh, Jesus, _fuck_. You— You shouldn’t be in here.”

He begins pacing on the stretch of floor in front of him, back and forth, back and forth.

Crowley is running anxious hands through his hair, across his face, pulling at any bit of _anything_ he can find. He fists his right hand atop his head and yanks so hard Aziraphale can see his knuckles turning white.

“Oh, don’t be ridiculous,” Aziraphale says softly, grasping his hands in front of him, “you come to my bookshop all the time.”

“Yes but,” Crowley stops pacing and digs around in his pockets for something. He comes up empty handed, then stalks to a box on his mantle, throws it open and pulls out a pair of sunglasses, “it’s filthy in here and I wasn’t expecting you. I… I would’ve cleaned or, _fuck_ , I don’t know.”

Aziraphale silently scans the room— noting the almost disturbing lack of evidence that anyone lived here. There is not a mote of dust on the window sills or the base-moldings, not a bit of dirt on the floor. The exterior windows even managed to be considerably more clean than Aziraphale’s.

“I don’t exactly know what you would’ve been cleaning,” he runs a finger along the small table next to him, “this place does not appear to be lived in.”

“It’s awful, I know,” Crowley starts, looking up at the ceiling, the eaves beyond the windows, “you never have to come here again.”

Aziraphale looks at him— the startled and ungainly mess of him, the long legs and the thin chest, the lines carved into his face. He looks… sad, alone, afraid, _uncertain_.

Something in Aziraphale’s chest physically hurts at the sight.

“I’m… I’m sorry,” he is saying, stepping towards Crowley there by the mantle, “I shouldn’t have just invited myself in like this.”

Crowley is breathing unsteadily, leaning against the stone wall of the fireplace.

Aziraphale glances at the empty glass bottles both broken and not that are strewn across the floor, the packs of empty cigarette cartons half-burnt in the fireplace. He starts to notice various things now that he can see— the distinct lack of furniture, the strange stoney pedestals arranged around the room, the—

Aziraphale blinks down at Crowley’s arm.

There are strange red lines down the inside of his left arm, down near the wrist, like the scratches of a cat.

He reaches out and grabs his hand, pulls it up toward his face.

“ _Angel_ , what— no,” he tries to pull his arm away but can’t, Aziraphale’s strength holding him firm.

“What… Crowley, did you get hurt?”

Aziraphale pushes up his sleeve— up past his elbow.

Crowley is pulling on his arm, trying to free it from the angel’s grasp.

“Uh, yeah,” he is saying, pulling, “in France.”

Aziraphale is furrowing his brow, ghosting his fingers along the evenly spaced lines.

He looks up into Crowley’s face, to his sunglasses that are perched haphazardly on his nose.

“You did this,” he whispers.

Crowley finally wrenches his arm away, says nothing.

“Why did you do this?” Aziraphale demands hotly, stepping closer.

Crowley backs up until he butts against the mantle.

“ _Crowley_ ,” he whispers, “ _why_?”

“I…” he looks very small all of a sudden, deflated, “I had a bad week.”

Aziraphale softens, releases his arm.

“Tell me about it?” He asks, and then reaches up, touches softly at the frame of the glasses.

Crowley leans imperceptibly into the touch, as if to say, _it’s all right, reveal me_.

Aziraphale pulls them off, slowly, tucks their arms carefully away.

Crowley’s eyes are _brilliant_ — molten gold, ringed with something warm and alive, like the dancing heart of a flame.

“I don’t have any furniture,” he says, as if that explains his bad week.

“Then we shall sit on the floor.”

And they do— sit on the floor in front of that stone fireplace, the glass bottles knocking together as they clear a space, Crowley breathing life into those glowing embers.

“Was France okay?” Aziraphale asks.

“France was okay. I saved a pigeon,” he says, and stares into the fire.

“A pigeon?”

“Yes. Cher Ami.”

Aziraphale blinks, “the pigeon had a name?”

“This one did.”

“Dear friend?” Aziraphale translates, “my French is rusty.”

There is a wry smile on Crowley’s mouth and Aziraphale knows he is remembering the French Revolution— remembering Aziraphale’s terrible attempt at persuading Jean-Claude the Executioner to not remove his traitorous head. Aziraphale is about to make a comment about it— about to tell him that his French has improved since then, _thank you very much_ , but then something sad broadcasts across Crowley’s face, his eyes suddenly looking much more liquid.

“Does it hurt?” Aziraphale is glancing down at his arm, as if seeing the shallow marks through his shirt.

“No,” Crowley says, “I just… I was having a moment.” He pauses, says softly, “they’re just scratches.”

“Okay,” Aziraphale breathes, trying to speak around the tightness in his throat.

Aziraphale reaches out and runs tentative fingers across his arm, “you promised me you wouldn’t keep hurting yourself,” he whispers.

He can see Crowley’s eyebrows knitting together from his profile.

“When did I promise that?” He asks, turning slightly to look at him.

Aziraphale licks his lips, stares up into Crowley’s eyes like lamplights.

“In… in the desert. The first time.”

There is a sudden bloom of color on Crowley’s face as he flushes in remembrance.

“The first time you…? Under the trees?” His voice is small, thin.

“When I pulled that bullet out of you.”

“And I promised you…?”

“ _Yes_ ,” Aziraphale says, emphatic.

“ _When_?”

“When I was… you know. And you were…”

Crowley rubs a hand across his face, “Jesus _Christ_ , angel I would promise you my _soul_ if you asked for it while jerking me off.”

Aziraphale’s heart beats distinctly harder.

“I’ll uhm, keep that in mind?” He tries a smile but it doesn’t feel right, not now— not with Crowley hurting himself with human vices and bits of broken glass.

Crowley looks over at him, looking small and tired, his hair grown out a bit on the top until it hangs down over his eyes.

“Promise me now,” Aziraphale says, and he can’t help it, even now, the way his heart does a strange squeezing in his chest— remembering a conversation more than fifty years ago about holy water, and again, in Verdun, how Crowley wouldn’t promise him this, even then.

His shoulders drop.

“I… I take promises very seriously,” Crowley says, slowly, deliberately. And then in a whisper, “don’t make me promise that.”

“Why not?” Aziraphale is saying, his breath a bit more difficult to come by, his heart flooding with adrenaline.

“Because,” he licks his lips, looks squarely into Aziraphale’s eyes, “because not existing is my backup plan.”

Aziraphale would not have believed that a heart that could beat for six-thousand years Could also break. He would not believe that hearts could fail on account of things like grief, loss, simple uncomplicated emotions.

But that six-thousand year old heart is breaking, right now— on account of all those things— grief, loss, simple uncomplicated emotions.

“Please,” Aziraphale can hear himself saying, “ _don’t_.”

When Crowley smiles it is sad around the eyes, reassuring in the mouth.

“It’s all ticking down to end times anyway, angel. This is just in case those end times come a bit sooner for me.”

There is a hollowness to his bones, his veins, his arteries— like they have been carved empty by realization.

 _But that’s not part of the plan_ , he thinks, because he has seen how it all plays out.

Aziraphale looks into that fire in front of him, like the one that will burn beside him up on that hill someday, and then realizes—

“Crowley,” he says, blinking up into his face, “it’s over.”

All of the color drains, abruptly, from his face.

“W— what?”

“The war,” Aziraphale is saying, then smiling, “it’s _over_.”

Crowley is blinking, once, _twice_ , and then turning away from him and breathing frenetically into the open space over his shoulder.

Aziraphale can see his chest rising, falling, in rapid succession— like a pant, like he cannot pull enough air into his lungs.

“Are you okay? I thought that would be good news,” he reaches down and finds Crowley’s palm, pushes his fingers into the negative spaces it holds.

Crowley squeezes his hand so tightly back that his bones physically ache under the strain.

He finally turns his head back, looks down at their interwoven fingers. His eyes are glassy, _wet_ , and there is still a distinct lack of color on his face.

“No,” he says, then clears his throat, “that’s good news.” Aziraphale watches the sharp movement of his throat as he swallows, “I just wasn’t expecting—“ he clears his throat again, “to hear you say that.”

“Oh,” he says, and wiggles a bit, “it was all very exciting out there on the streets. I’m surprised you didn’t hear the bells chiming.”

Crowley makes a noise in the back of his throat, smiling tightly, “I didn’t.”

“Heavy sleeper?”

“Something like that.”

“Well,” Aziraphale clears his throat, “we’re going to have to be careful,” he starts, glancing nervously around the room, as if at any moment a demon might appear out of the walls. He lowers his voice, “if we are going to keep doing this… _this_. There won’t be a _war_ that we can get lost in. We’re going to have to be much more careful. Underhanded.”

“Underhanded,” Crowley repeats faintly.

“Yes. You know,” he flexes the fingers of his free hand in front of him, wiggles a bit in the shoulders, “like… like sleight of hand.”

“Sleight of hand.”

“Yes.”

Aziraphale looks up, to find Crowley looking decidedly pale and all together unfocused.

“Are you all right, dear?”

Crowley licks his dry lips, glances up to meet Aziraphale’s gaze.

“I’ll be fine, angel.”

It seems, to Aziraphale, that there is something he is not saying, some indefinable elephant in the room.

“Let’s get some lunch.”

“We can still do lunch?” Crowley asks, “is lunch underhanded?”

“Of course. But, erm, perhaps we should take separate transport, not sit next to each other on the way there.”

Crowley looks down at their hands still laced together between them, slowly pulls his hand away.

“Okay,” he says, breathing steadily, “give me a moment will you? Gonna go…” he swallows, “clean up a bit.”

“Of course.”

Crowley manages to rise from a sitting position as if being pulled up by his ribcage, swaying a bit when he stands. He looks down at Aziraphale for a moment, then pauses, walks off down that dark hallway.

The fire crackles soothingly, and Aziraphale can see hints of odd half-charred things in the ash beneath the fireplace grate: cigarette cartons, broken glass, the burnt fringes of a towel, what appear to be a broken set of sunglasses.

Aziraphale narrows his eyes, runs his tongue over his teeth, decides to look around.

On first glance there is nothing in this cavernous room save for curtains the color of charcoal and a handful of strange stone tables. But now that he looks he can see small evidences of corvid life here— a collection of boxes along the windowsill, a pale bit of fabric draped over one of those stone tables in the corner, that metallic statue he noticed earlier.

Aziraphale glances down that dark hallway, sees no sign of Crowley yet. So he stands, dusts his hands along his trousers, walks curiously over to the windowsill.

There are three small wooden boxes in a row, their edges neatly aligned.

He glances over his shoulder, glances back, flips up the first lid.

Inside is a seashell, a perfect curved tube of golden ratios, a bit of sand on the box floor.

He opens the next box. Inside there are two twin bullets, dented, having been fired, standing upright next to each other. Aziraphale picks them up curiously, runs his thumb along the dented parts.

He sets it down, furrows his brow, opens the last box.

There is the craggy exterior of an oyster shell inside, and another one next to it, the underside face up— looking smooth and well-worn, as if an anxious thumb has been polishing it for many centuries.

He closes the lids, perches against the windowsill, thoughtful.

There are sounds of water running in the bathroom.

Aziraphale glances over at that stone table, with what he can now see is a sculpture of two angels wrestling. He blinks. Next to it, in the corner, is the other stone pedestal with the pale bit of fabric laying over it. He looks down at the hallway, then back to the stone table. He walks over to it, curiosity getting the better of him.

The fabric is all at once familiar— because it’s _his_.

He lifts it and shakes it out, running curious fingers over the buttons, the collar— it is his shirt from years ago— a shirt that he has not seen since Verdun, since he gave it to Crowley to wear as he sat on his office sofa, bleeding and dripping wet and shivering with cold.

Aziraphale turns and looks at the boxes lined up on the windowsill— the neat magpie gathering of sentimental tokens— a seashell from their afternoon in Spain, twin bullets dug out of immortal skin, oyster-shells from their first shared meal in Rome.

He looks around at the stone tables that have nothing on them yet, the stone tables that have not yet amassed another piece for this museum of their history together, a timeline of their meaningful moments. Snapshots of memories. Captured ghosts.

He can hear the door to the bathroom opening, hurriedly places the shirt back on that stone surface.

When Crowley reappears it is with his hair slightly wet, new sunglasses on his face. Aziraphale can still see the white line of the scar above his ear, through his cropped hair, the dark squiggle of his signature tattooed along his face.

He cannot help the way his heart skips a beat, the way Crowley shoving his hands into his pockets and hitching his shoulders up to his ears pulls a smile out of the corners of his mouth.

He cannot help the flood of love that he is probably throwing into the ether, cannot help it if Crowley is drowning in that emotion that is pouring off of his skin in waves.

Aziraphale loves him, _loves_ him— all of him— the sharp angles and the burnt bits— loves him _as-is_ , a non conditional sale— the warped floorboards and the water damage in the basement, the ghosts in the attic.

 _I love what’s underneath,_ he thinks, _I love all your shapes, your darkness, your indecisions_.

He steps up to Crowley and palms the shell of his ear, tries to resist the gravitational pull of planets that is urging their lips together. And he does, for now, _not yet_.

_Love thine enemy_ , he thinks, and then in answer, his heart beating: _I do, I do, I do_.

They step out of Crowley’s flat separately, Aziraphale going first. And then they walk down the sidewalks on opposite sides of the same street, both heading in the same direction, both casting glances at each other from across the distance, unable to hide their smiles— both of them wearing the skins they walked into this world together wearing and now walking out into a new millennium looking the same— the sharp angles, the burnt bits, the water damage in the basement. Ghosts in the attic. A non-conditional sale. _As-is_.

**Author's Note:**

> It occurred to me at some point that I should have included footnotes to all of the historical details that I have poured into this absurd series. But alas, I did not. So instead, I’m going to ramble incoherently about all of things that I put far too much time into. Feel free to skip this.  
> In case anyone was wondering, absolutely all of the details are true. All of the places are real, the battles are real, the miracles they performed were all real. Fort Vaux in Verdun was a real place and they really did have a problem with boots getting suctioned off in the mud. Trench foot was a problem. There really was an Easter ceasefire along the Eastern Front. Spain really did remain neutral and was the only place that was actually reporting on how fucking awful the Spanish flu was (which is why they called it the Spanish flu). The Al Wahj/Arab Revolt actually did involve blowing up a train, and Frater Achad/Charles Stansfeld Jones really did drabble in the occult and get penalized for draft-dodging. The Italians really did fall back over the river along the Italian Front in Austria-Hungary (side note: Crowley flattens the tires on a ambulance, which is a catalyst for events in Hemmingway’s A Farewell to Arms which takes place on the Italian Front)  
> Germany really did have communication issues (there's some irony there about Crowley cutting telephone lines and not being able to communicate with Aziraphale, but that's another essay) and the town of Amiens was infiltrated by Allied soldiers before dawn— resulting in massive quantities of German POWs. Brockton was a real POW camp that really was overflowing. The Germans really did use up their nitrogen stores to build explosives and really did have a food shortage as a result. The Lost Battalion is of course real, and was really populated mostly by American soldiers from New York. 
> 
> \--------
> 
> Other notes: THANK YOU all eternally for leaving me comments, and talking with me on Tumblr. I hope you've all enjoyed my take on these love-struck idiots. I fucking cherish the kind words you leave me. Truly. 
> 
> See you all in the next series (hopefully) <3


End file.
